PROFILE: LAVENDER COUNTRY Tom Murray

Lavender Country:

It’s taken fi ve decades of not compromising to fi nd his audience, but Patrick Haggerty’s still not ever going to be Nashville’s plaything.

By Tom Murray

Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country

A number of years back, singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country found himself performing at a small, working man’s bar in Milwaukee.

“I walked in and the accommodations were not good,” recalls the 77-year-old Haggerty from his home in Seattle, Washington. “The stage was not really a stage, and there wasn’t enough room for the band. There was a pretty good-sized crowd, though, and in it were these six or seven black men from the neighborhood. Middle aged, somewhere between 50 to 70, clearly heterosexual. I’m looking at these men and you could tell they were thinking ‘what are you doing in our bar?’”

Truth to tell, Haggerty was thinking that as well. As an unabashedly queer, Marxist artist with a love for classic country, this wasn’t exactly his expected target market. Thing is, after years of battling homophobia and capitalism, a handful of skeptical straight men wasn’t going to put him off .

“I said to myself that my assignment tonight was to win these guys over. That’s what I’m gonna concentrate on, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Patrick Haggerty running for the State Senate in 1988

Photo credit: supplied

Photo credit: Sarah Wainwright

Lavender Country Patrick Haggerty

You know how this plays out, of course. By the end of the evening Haggerty had the men on the dance fl oor laughing and singing along with the audience. It’s a heartwarming anecdote about people reaching across artifi cial barriers, but Haggerty is also very aware that it took a long time to get to this point.

Born in the mid ‘40s on a dairy farm in Dry Creek, Washington, Haggerty’s predilection for glitter and girl’s clothing was an early indicator to his father that young Patrick wasn’t going to be like the other boys. However, unlike many other parents of the time, Charles Edward Haggerty was sympathetic to his son’s orientation, sitting him down as a pre-teen to advise Haggerty never to “sneak around.” It took the future musician and political activist a few years to fully understand the meaning behind them, but by the time he came out in his mid ‘20s (directly after the Stonewall Riots in New York) Haggerty realized just how important those words were.

In the late ‘60s he moved to Missoula, Montana for a short period of time, hanging with hippies, occasionally making trips across the Canadian border to see rock bands and smoke hash. After knocking about for a period of time he ended up taking graduate studies in Seattle, where he helped form Lavender Country in 1972. As groundbreaking as it was to have an out lead singer in a country band, it was songs from their self-titled, 1973 debut like Back in the Closet Again and Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears that shook up listeners both straight and queer.

“They like to propose that country music is the music of the white working class,” Haggerty scoff s. “Actually, the worst of it glorifi es poverty; it’s sanctimonious and awful. I grew up with cardboard in my shoes on a dairy farm with ten brothers and sisters and no money. Poverty is not glorious. Struggles are important. I think the last song about class struggle out of Nashville may have been Take This Job and Shove It. I wanted to sing about things that mattered to me”

In other words, Haggerty was not going to sneak around. With Lavender Country, a group of gay and straight musicians intent on upending classic country cliches, he did just that, replacing the usual banal country motifs with deeply heartfelt musings on gay identity and politics. Ahead of their time and also bounded by it, they were celebrated in the Pacifi c Northwest gay community and ignored outside of it. The band stuck it out for a few years, but mainstream country music was having nothing to do with them. When they folded in 1976, Haggerty was initially hurt but he quickly shifted, putting his energy back into activism and progressive causes.

“No regrets, darling; I had a great life being a screaming Marxist bitch,” he laughs. “(In the early ‘90s) I ran for offi ce with folks in the Nation of Islam as part of a unity platform. I fought against apartheid, I fought for gay rights and Black power. I got married to a lovely man and raised two children; nothing is more important to me than my children. Some people will compare Lavender Country to my children, but I mean, don’t even go there.”

There was no chance that something as groundbreaking as Lavender Country was going to disappear completely, however. An article by the Journal of Country Music on gay country musicians in 1999 brought Haggerty and crew back in the spotlight, followed by a CD re-release of the album and a fi ve song EP, Lavender Country Revisited. It was still too soon, however; Haggerty enjoyed the blip of attention and then happily went back into the world of activism.

When he and his husband J.B. retired outside of Seattle in the early 2000s, Haggerty began picking up the guitar again. He started up a duo with blues harmonica player Robert Taylor and started playing retirement homes as a sideline. As he and Taylor pulled out the classic country chestnuts for the retirees, Lavender Country was slowly being discovered by a new generation.

“A guy called me up and introduced himself as Robert Dekker,” Haggerty says. “He’s the director of an avant-garde ballet company called Post:Ballet in San Francisco. He told me that he’d been up all night thinking about how to choreograph Lavender Country, and would I be okay with a Lavender Country ballet?”

If anything was more surreal to Haggerty than the idea of gay country music, it was gay country music set to a ballet.

“I was like, sure, you’re going to fucking do a ballet about a queer, radical Marxist. Lo and behold, one thing led to another and there

Photo credit: Jim Bennett

Patrick Haggerty with Orville Peck

were dancers moving to my music. At first it was to the original recordings, but then they asked me to come down and play live while the ballet dancers performed. I told him straight out, ‘You know, buddy, you are fucking nuts. I’ve never been to a ballet in my life.’ He talked me into it and we put on the ballet. It was the artistic experience of a lifetime.”

It was also a timely reminder to Haggerty that the music Lavender Country made was of great value outside of his own world.

“I went backstage after a show and discovered them in the dressing room in a football huddle. I was like, ‘Oh, boy, what’s going on here?’ One of the ballet dancers looked up and said ‘You don’t get it. We don’t dance for money, we dance for art. Most ballet dancers never have a professional opportunity to dance to something that they believe in.’”

At that point things began to snowball for Haggerty, who soon found that the country music world was no longer as close-minded as it once was.

“It’s an interesting dynamic,” he says. “What I’m finding is that a lot of great country musicians are approaching me, and what’s really going on is that they’re not hicks, they’re not rednecks, they’re really sympathetic. That whole world is filled with people who actually have pretty progressive politics. They’re doing what they know they have to do to get money and I don’t blame them. It was a difficult choice for me back in 1973 to not do mainstream country music instead of Lavender Country. But what’s really true about many, many country musicians is what was also true about the ballet dancers. They’re sick in the heart because they don’t get an opportunity to say what they actually want to say.”

A number of short documentaries and a new album in 2019 (Blackberry Rose) saw Haggerty quite clearly saying what he means to say. The younger generation, entranced by this “bitchy” septuagenarian rebel, has reached out to him. He worked with drag queen Trixie Mattel on a version of I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You for her third album, Barbara, and was personally invited to open for fellow queer country artist Orville Peck. The rising interest in Haggerty and Lavender Country led to Blackberry Rose obtaining a proper release on Don Giovanni Records in February of 2022.

“It’s been amazing,” Haggerty marvels. “Just a few years ago I struggled to find gigs, but now people are paying attention. And the thing is, it’s not who I expected. One day I was invited to play a punk show where everybody was loud and talking over the music, which was really thrashy. Then Lavender Country came onstage and you could hear a pin drop. We were so quiet and everybody in the room was absolutely glued to every word that came out of my mouth. Now that’s a fucking compliment, right?”

It may have taken Haggerty over five decades, but he’s finally found his people. They’re punks, queers, country music fans, heteros, Marxists, folks drawn inexorably to the raw, confessional truths of his songs. He’s glad to have everyone along for the ride, but he also wants you to know that he’s not ever going to be Nashville’s plaything.

“The record industry is all about control,” he rasps, warming to the topic. “You’re fine as long as you don’t talk about real struggles. Don’t talk about Karl Marx, don’t talk about organizing. Don’t talk about the real nitty-gritty of life. Slog it out with the bourgeoisie, and if you’re gorgeous and they might even make you into a star.” He sighs. “That’s the corporate world, and I’m not talking about the artists themselves. Maybe that’s how that world operates, and it’s just an empty, vapid life for them. That was never anything I was interested in, however, and I’m still not interested. I am having a marvelous time sticking it to them now, though.”

Tom Murray is a freelance writer, barely competent gardener, and your first call mandolin player if anyone ever wants to start a Pogues cover band. He’s written about music, movies, art, and food for over 25 years. As a touring musician he’s slept on more floors than anyone you know, and as a writer he’s angered an ex-member of The Byrds and hit it off with a hobbit. Tom has nearly won a few regional writing awards, almost been in a hit Hollywood movie, and could have been a member of a critically acclaimed touring ensemble. As it is, he’s just happy to crank out words for a living and learn the occasional Earth, Wind, & Fire cover in his basement with friends. He lives in Western Canada with two dogs, a perennially angry cat, and a, thankfully, understanding wife.